Home Office routinely
loses thousands of
vital documents

1 June 2018

Passports, birth and marriage certificates and other important original papers are regularly mislaid by immigration services, it was claimed yesterday,

As a result, thousands of people are unable to prove their identity, apply for a British visa or gain access to vital services for months, even years.

The Guardian reports of two women who have lived in the UK for decades, but their applications to remain were never returned, and the repercussions have included suffering ‘significant financial losses’.

Opposition MPs were quick to condemn this revelation, with Stephen Doughty saying:

‘The Home Office has a shocking history of losing documents from passports to identity papers which I flagged up as early as 2013.

‘In more recent times, increased delays in processing cases has also meant people often being without key documents for months or even years on end.’

David Lammy, an outspoken critic of the recent Windrush scandal, tweeted from his official account: ‘FFS what an incompetent shambles.’

Yvette Cooper, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, agreed:

‘This is a question of basic competence. Too often we have heard about lost documents and simple errors by the Home Office that can have deeply damaging consequences for people’s lives.’

A Home Office spokesman responded:

‘The Home Office takes its data protection responsibilities extremely seriously and have robust safeguards in place to make sure we handle the millions of documents we receive in the appropriate way.

‘When documentation goes missing we make every effort to locate it. Each case should be reported to Home Office Security who will assess whether the Information Commissioner’s Office should be informed.’

Previously, the Home Office has never made a voluntary self-referral to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the data protection watchdog, about these losses. But self-reporting is now compulsory in certain cases.

A spokesperson for the ICO said:

‘Under previous data protection law, there was no formal obligation to report data breaches, but that has changed under new legislation.

‘From 25 May, breaches are notifiable if they affect the rights and freedoms of individuals. We’ll be contacting the Home Office and making enquiries.’

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